OJ ed Em (Daniel Kaluuya e Keke Palmer) I am two brothers living in a rural California gorgewhere they manage together with their father, Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David), a family ranch, and are heirs of an ancient dynasty that trains horses for the cinema. When the parent dies, being hit by a nickel dropped inexplicably from the sky, OJ and Em inherit the property. While the former tries to keep the paternal business to preserve the parent’s legacy, the latter hopes to find fame and stardom in Hollywood.
Soon, due to a series of unforeseen events and the inevitable change in the technological scenarios of cinema, the Haywood brothers find themselves full of financial problems and, as if that were not enough, the horses seem to vanish into thin air, while those still present are nervous. and have violent reactions. OJ is then forced to sell some horses to Park skirt (Steven Yeun): a former television prodigy who opened an amusement park in their parts, making money with chilling lucidity on a personal tragedy that marked his childhood and even museumizing the dark side of entertainment and in particular of the sitcom which he had taken part in, Gordy’s Homein the form of a macabre joke and a sketch to make the hair stand on end (Peele, emblematically, has linked his beginnings precisely to the profession of comedian).
Nope offers us from the first minutes a story of terror and horror in which our gaze immediately coincides with the eyes and the point of view of the characters, grappling with what seems to be nothing more than a UFO placed there to overhang their heads. As in his two previous films, Scappa – Get Out e We, Jordan Peele play with an idea high concept to be offered to viewers in the key of paradox at the same time maximalist and metaphoricalin order to force the boundaries and known shortcuts of the genre and bring it towards new, rough theoretical territoriesin which never as in this case the sword of Damocles of the great tension device passes over the heads of all and also swings menacingly from one end to the other of what it is, of course, a landscape first of all politicoilluminated by dim and distant flames, often sparse and all to be deciphered.
Se Get Out reflected on the racial question not entirely unearthed in post-Obama America in the most blatant way possible e We elected the splitting of a family of blacks (equally Americans) as the greatest symbol of violence and the repressed of the past of the States, in Nope the reflection extends to the most perverse and distorted dynamics of show business stars and stripeswith an even higher degree of ambition and abstraction of the staging if possible and an even more pronounced old-fashioned author horror dimension, which inevitably rejects Peele in the Agone of the Carpenters and the Romero – mutatis mutandis – with renewed bravado (to those who recently acclaimed him as the best horror director of all time, Peele himself nevertheless replied: “I love his enthusiasm, but I can’t tolerate another slander against John Carpenter”).
Whether it is a film about the very act of seeing – and in particular on the dangers and pitfalls inherent in the overexposure of our observing subjectivities and on the perhaps excessive weight that today’s society entrusts to the individual and omnipresent filter of experiences – Nope He reiterates this on several occasions, since opening quote of prophet Nahum («I will throw an abominable filth upon you, humiliate you and expose you to mockery»). Em after all convinces OJ to install cameras on the ranch in hopes of understanding what is happening and saying record a video that can make them rich, perhaps selling it to Oprah Winfreyonly to collide with an immobility of the sensitive data and of what we see that says a lot about the shackles to which the laziness and the automatism of our perceptions (above all visual) often force us.
The protagonists of Nopewhich clearly in addition to intercepting the science fiction it is also a westernI am Asian and African American cowboysthe latter even descendants of African American jockey at a gallop and Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 in the series of photographs The horse in motionconsidered an absolute prototype of cinematography and capable of making its author a sort of “grandfather of cinema”. Quest’inside joke from cinema history hardcore it is not just a trinket and an ordinary cinephile habit but it betrays very well the will of Peele di go back to the origins of the scopic drives and obsessions of the cinematographic medium and its practices to build an audiovisual show in which knowing how to move the camera and play with images in an ancestral key is worth more than any cheap bewilderment, small minutiae count as great jolts and negation – of oneself, and therefore also of one’s own look – paradoxically it can turn out to be the highest form of identity affirmation and the only possible flaw in the system.
Foto: Universal Pictures, Monkeypaw Productions
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